Salesforce announces $2 billion investment in Canada

Salesforce has announced it will invest $2bn in Canada over the next five years as it becomes the latest U.S. tech company to look north. Salesforce will commit to the increasingly crowded Canada tech scene by creating jobs and opening more data centres.

The investment was announced by Salesforce in a press release this week. The company is one of the leading cloud software vendors and CRM providers, with its products used in over 6,000 major Canadian companies. Salesforce specialises in sales, marketing and analytics services and is pivoting to focus on digital transformation.

Canada will become the new home for further developments in its business. According to the company, it will have indirectly created over 28,000 Canadian jobs by 2022 through its partnerships, customers and software solutions. This equates to approximately $17 billion in business revenue.

Salesforce's new investment will enable a significant expansion of the company's Canada operations. It will grow its headcount in the country, open additional data centre resources and purchase more real estate. By hiring new people and moving extra cloud capacity into the country, Salesforce will be able to provide improved services to Canada's increasingly digitalised industries.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff will meet with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to discuss the investment. The company said it is investing in Canada because of the country's diversity and equality. Reuters reports Benioff wouldn't comment on whether the Trump administration's immigration policies have influenced the decision.

"Canada is one of the most exciting investment opportunities for Salesforce and we are thrilled to commit $2B over the next five years to fuel future growth," said Benioff. "As the world's fastest growing top 5 software company, we look forward to a great partnership and to expanding our employees, customers and innovation in Canada."

Canada is becoming a hub of innovation in emerging technologies including artificial intelligence. Over the past year, more companies have moved to increase their investment in the country's tech scene. Canada's now home to research labs from most major tech companies, which is prompting demand for cloud capacity to host compute resources. Salesforce's expansion will allow it to provide additional cloud services to businesses inside Canada.

Salesforce cited Gartner research that found it's among the three largest enterprise software vendors in the region, presenting it with new opportunities to further extend its reach. Canadian companies including Air Canada, Husky Energy, Loblaws, Manulife, Roots, TD Bank and TELUS are existing customers of the firm's CRM platform, which incorporates sales, support and marketing functions.